Odyssey
“A
genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply
felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.”
Thomas
Moore (Care of the Soul)
To say that I am not a
world traveler is as much of an understatement as saying that I don't
have blue wings and antlers. I have ventured outside the borders of
the United States only a handful of times. I have friends who travel.
Some, who jet off to somewhere they haven't been before as often as
possible. They seem not to mind being confined to an airplane for two
days and arriving in a place where they don't know one single word of
the language. In fact, my sons are pretty much that way, or would be
if they could. I guess I just missed that adventurous gene that
craves new experiences.
There are places in this
world I'd like to see with my own eyes, of course—the Irish coast
from which my ancestors came, those very strange, conical land
formations in Cappadocia's Goreme National Park in Turkey, where
people hand carved caves in which to live, the Syrian village of
Ma'loula, where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is still spoken. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to the middle east in this lifetime.
If you, like me, are not
an born explorer in the physical sense, you can still have your
odyssey. There is every sort of material available, on line, in
libraries, streaming on National Geographic—all you have to do is
look for them. Whatever you find, wherever in the world or in the
cosmos you find it, the odyssey will not be an external one. How you
respond in your heart and soul to the place, the people, to the land,
the culture, to the sacredness of it—that is the journey. One of
the things that made an indelible impression on me, for instance, in
Guatemala, was the reverence of the Holy Week parades, in which the
people of each village carried the icons of the church on hand-held
floats through the streets. On the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, it
was the sweetness of the people and their peaceful way of life, open
to the elements, the animals, and to one another. If you are a
foreign-land traveler, find what speaks to your soul. If you're not a
foreign-land traveler, do the same. The only real journey we take is
to be found there.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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